Wednesday, December 28, 2016

A Time for Celebration


This is the time of year for looking back on things we've accomplished in the last 12 months, and  we're happy to report on the "birth" of a pet project we had been discussing for several years. It's great to watch a project finally come to fruition.

Sue and Becky are the proud “parents” of Dottie, the Writing Mouse, who made her appearance this year in the form of two teaching books for beginning and intermediate writers.
 
We named her Dottie as she loves those three little dots when writing and we couldn’t very well call her “Ellipsis.”  That’s no name for a cute, lovable mouse.
 
Anyway, with Dottie in mind as the teacher, we put together the lessons we had created for our many on-line classes and organized them in DIY form and called the whole series, Let’s Write a Story.
 

The first book, Seven Ways to Plot, came out at the beginning of the year and can be found on Amazon in both print and ebook formats.  
 
Dottie’s second book, Creating Memorable Characters,  came out in the summer and is also now available in both formats and up on Amazon.
 
It was amazing to us how much time it took to give “birth” to Dottie. We had thought it was just a matter of putting together our lessons we had written, edited and perfected over the years in various writing classes.
 
But no, many other steps were involved--all of which took months to do. In actuality, it was sort of like taking lamaze birthing classes. Covers, as well as back covers had to designed, decisions on what the formatting layout should look like, ISBN numbers to buy, editing and proofing to do and redo as simple as sometimes the “trees in the forest” got overlooked or misplaced.
 
And now, that a new year is upon us, we look forward to announcing the imminent birth of Dottie’s third child, with lectures drawn from our most famous and well-know teaching class The Plotting Wheel.
 
Conceiving the idea was pretty simple, but like going through the pregnancy it was a long and difficult process. Many hours were spent on getting the information written just right so there can be no misunderstanding from a would-be writer picking up the book and setting out to use it as a learning tool. Once that was done we had to work on editing the book and that has taken loads of patience and consideration. Needless to say, we're still working on it.  
 
But never fear, just as a 40 week pregnancy finally comes to an end, so will our work on The Plotting Wheel book. It should be available this spring. We hope you'll watch for it. It’s a bundle of information that will help any writer, in easy steps, with plotting their book.

We hope your year has been busy with writing projects and we wish all our readers the best in the New Year.